National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches

Toni
Morrison,
Winner of the 1996
DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS AWARD

The Dancing
Mind - November 6, 1996

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely
the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace
I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule,
nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The
peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind
when it engages another equally open one--an activity
that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing
world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular
kind of peace warrants vigilance. The peril it faces
comes not from the computers and information highways
that raise alarm among book readers, but from unrecognized,
more sinister quarters.

I want to tell two little stories-- anecdotes really--that
circle each other in my mind. They are disparate, unrelated
anecdotes with more to distinguish each one from the
other than similarities, but they are connected for
me in a way that I hope to make clear.

The first I heard third or fourth-hand, and although
I can't vouch for its accuracy, I do have personal knowledge
of situations exactly like it. A student at a very very
prestigious university said that it was in graduate
school while working on his Ph.D. that he had to teach
himself a skill he had never learned. He had grown up
in an affluent community with very concerned and caring
parents. He said that his whole life had been filled
with carefully selected activities: educational, cultural,
athletic. Every waking hour was filled with events to
enhance his life. Can you see him? Captain of his team.
Member of the Theatre Club. A Latin Prize winner. Going
on vacations designed for pleasure and meaningfulness;
on fascinating and educational trips and tours; attending
excellent camps along with equally highly motivated
peers. He gets the best grades, is a permanent fixture
on the honor roll, gets into several of the best universities,
graduates, goes on to get a master's degree, and now
is enrolled in a Ph.D. program at this first-rate university.
And it is there that (at last, but fortunately) he discovers
his disability: in all those years he had never learned
to sit in a room by himself and read for four hours
and have those four hours followed by another four without
any companionship but his own mind. He said it was the
hardest thing he ever had to do, but he taught himself,
forced himself to be alone with a book he was not assigned
to read, a book on which there was no test. He forced
himself to be alone without the comfort of disturbance
of telephone, radio, television. To his credit, he learned
this habit, this skill, that once was part of any literate
young person's life.

Toni Morrison receiving
the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters at the
1996 National Book Awards.
Photo: Robin Platzer.

The second story involves a first-hand experience.
I was in Strasbourg attending a meeting of a group called
the Parliament of Writers. It is an organization of
writers committed to the aggressive rescue of persecuted
writers. After one of the symposia, just outside the
doors of the hall, a woman approached me and asked if
I knew anything about the contemporary literature of
her country. I said no; I knew nothing of it. We talked
a few minutes more. Earlier, while listening to her
speak on a panel, I had been awestruck by her articulateness,
the ease with which she moved among languages and literatures,
her familiarity with histories of nations, histories
of criticisms, histories of authors. She knew my work;
I knew nothing of hers. We continued to talk, animatedly,
and then, in the middle of it, she began to cry. No
sobs, no heaving shoulders, just great tears rolling
down her face. She did not wipe them away and she did
not loosen her gaze. "You have to help us,"
she said. "You have to help us. They are shooting
us down in the street." By "us" she meant
women who wrote against the grain. "What can I
do?" I asked her. She said, "I don't know,
but you have to try. There isn't anybody else."

Both of those stories are comments on the contemporary
reading/writing life. In one, a comfortable, young American,
a "successfully" educated male, alien in his
own company, stunned and hampered by the inadequacy
of his fine education, resorts to autodidactic strategies
to move outside the surfeit and bounty and excess and
(I think) the terror of growing up vacuum-pressured
in this country and to learn a very old-fashioned skill.
In the other, a splendidly educated woman living in
a suffocating regime writes in fear that death may very
well be the consequence of doing what I do: as a woman
to write and publish unpoliced narrative. The danger
of both environments is striking. First, the danger
to reading that our busied-up, education-as-horse-race,
trophydriven culture poses even to the entitled; second,
the physical danger to writing suffered by persons with
enviable educations who live in countries where the
practice of modern art is illegal and subject to official
vigilantism and murder.

I have always doubted and disliked the therapeutic
claims made on behalf of writing and writers. Writing
never made me happy. Writing never made me suffer. I
have had misfortunes small and large, yet all through
them nothing could keep me from doing it. And nothing
could satiate my appetite for others who did. What is
so important about this craft that it dominates me and
my colleagues? A craft that appears solitary but needs
another for its completion. A craft that signals independence
but relies totally on an industry. It is more than an
urge to make sense artfully or to believe it matters.
It is more than a desire to watch other writers manage
to refigure the world. I know now, more than I ever
did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need
that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of
my own mind while it touches another's--which is reading:
what the graduate student taught himself. That I need
to offer the fruits of my own imaginative intelligence
to another without fear of anything more deadly than
disdain--which is writing: what the woman writer fought
a whole government to do.

Photo credit: Kate Kunz

The reader disabled by an absence of solitude; the
writer imperiled by the absence of a hospitable community.
Both stories fuse and underscore for me the seriousness
of the industry whose sole purpose is the publication
of writers for readers. It is a business, of course,
in which there is feasting, and even some coin; there
is drama and high, high spirits. There is celebration
and anguish, there are flukes and errors in judgment;
there is brilliance and unbridled ego. But that is the
costume. Underneath the cut of bright and dazzling cloth,
pulsing beneath the jewelry, the life of the book world
is quite serious. Its real life is about creating and
producing and distributing knowledge; about making it
possible for the entitled as well as the dispossessed
to experience one's own mind dancing with another's;
about making sure that the environment in which this
work is done is welcoming, supportive. It is making
sure that no encroachment of private wealth, government
control, or cultural expediency can interfere with what
gets written or published. That no conglomerate or political
wing uses its force to still inquiry or to reaffirm
rule.

Securing that kind of peace--the peace of the dancing
mind--is our work, and, as the woman in Strasbourg said,
"There isn't anybody else."